Quotes & Sayings About Harlem Renaissance

What do we call our Harlem Renaissance? Maybe in the future, it won't be just Latino, maybe it'll be more multi-multi, because, you know, people are such fusions now, of so many different cultures. — Sandra Cisneros

When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were. In fact, until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all. — Aberjhani

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

We are drawn to the Renaissance because of the hope for black uplift and interracial empathy that it embodied and because there is a certain element of romanticism associated with the era's creativity, its seemingly larger than life heroes and heroines, and its most brilliantly lit terrain, Harlem, USA. — Clement Alexander Price

Whose little boy are you? — James Baldwin

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years. — Debbie Allen

The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance. — Aberjhani

To the memory of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, El Greco, and many others who came before me as well as those who will come after. We are one. Thank you. — Luther E. Vann

Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream. — Jean Toomer

After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort. — Patrick Rothfuss

From the small clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where he began playing saxophone to world tours for the biggest of the big bands, Benny Carter redefined American jazz. From the start, his fellow musicians said the way he played the sax was amazing. They say that about me, too. (Laughter.) But I don't think they mean it in quite the same way. — William J. Clinton

It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks. — Clement Alexander Price

I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance. — Sandra Cisneros

Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance ... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure. — David Levering Lewis